Durban's Mobs Are Hunting Foreigners While Pretoria Looks Away

Another human being is dead in the streets of Durban. A foreign national, someone's son or daughter, someone's breadwinner, was killed during anti-immigrant protests that swept through the city's central business district. Police are investigating. Investigations are what governments announce after they have already failed.

This is not an isolated tragedy. Reporting on the violence describes months of rallies in which at least ten foreigners have been killed. Several governments across the continent have been forced to organise emergency repatriations of their citizens, pulling people out of a country that once promised them refuge. Let that sink in. In the land of Nelson Mandela, the land that fought apartheid's racial terror, African migrants are now being told to pack their lives into a bag and run.

So we have to ask the question South Africa's leaders keep dodging. How many more funerals will it take before the state treats this as the emergency it is?

Let us be precise about what is happening, because precision is what separates a democratic argument from a mob's chant. South Africa's constitution guarantees the right to life and dignity to everyone within its borders, not just citizens. Section 9 prohibits unfair discrimination. Section 12 protects freedom from violence from either public or private sources. When a crowd hunts a Malawian vendor, a Zimbabwean nurse, or a Mozambican mechanic through a city centre, it is not "expressing frustration." It is committing crimes against people the constitution explicitly protects. Those who lead these mobs, and those who fail to arrest them, are violating the founding promise of the democracy that millions of South Africans died to build.

Reports describe groups such as Operation Dudula, which has organised street campaigns demanding that foreigners be cleared from clinics, schools, and workplaces. Its tactics have included confronting people in public spaces and demanding documents at the point of a crowd. Call that what it is: vigilantism dressed up as community activism. A democracy does not hand the power of immigration enforcement to a mob with a megaphone. Only the state has that authority, and only through courts, due process, and accountable officials.

And here is the uncomfortable truth that our politicians would rather not discuss. This anger is not coming from nowhere. South Africa has an unemployment rate hovering above 30 percent by the broad definition, one of the highest in the world. Young South Africans in townships are competing for scarce jobs, housing, and public services, and too many of them have been told by opportunists that the problem is the foreigner standing next to them in the queue. The problem is not the foreigner. The problem is a state that has failed to grow its economy, process its own visa and asylum backlogs, or enforce labour law equally against employers who exploit undocumented workers and then pocket the savings.

Anyone who has studied South African history knows this is not new. In 2008, xenophobic violence killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands. Durban itself saw violence against foreigners in 2015. Each time, the government promised action. Each time, the perpetrators were rarely prosecuted in any meaningful number, and the message received across the region was that attacking migrants carries little cost. Impunity is the oxygen that keeps these fires burning. Every unpunished killing teaches the next mob that it can go further.

The regional consequences are serious. South Africa is the economic engine of southern Africa. Its farms, hospitals, mines, and construction sites depend on workers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, and beyond. When those workers flee, the damage does not stop at the border. It hits remittances that feed families in rural villages across the region, it strains neighbours who must absorb returnees, and it poisons the idea of the Southern African Development Community as a community at all. Who benefits from this? Not the unemployed South African youth who are told to blame their neighbours. Not the businesses that will lose their workforce. Those who benefit are the political entrepreneurs who harvest anger for votes and the criminal networks that thrive wherever the rule of law collapses.

We have seen the alternative. Botswana has built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by pairing prudent fiscal management with strong institutions and a credible, independent judiciary. Mauritius has grown from a sugar-dependent island into a diversified economy by attracting investment and treating its workforce with dignity under clear rules. Rwanda's economic model is worth studying for its rigorous state capacity, even as we condemn its military adventurism abroad. Each of these countries shows that prosperity comes from predictable rules, enforceable contracts, and public institutions that do their jobs. None of them solved their problems by letting crowds decide who belongs.

So what must South Africa do? First, the state must prosecute every killing and every act of intimidation linked to these protests, with particular attention to organisers and to officers who stand aside while people are murdered. Second, Parliament and the Department of Home Affairs must clear the asylum and work-permit backlogs that create the chaos crowds exploit, with transparent timelines and digital processing that cannot be bribed away. Third, the government must enforce labour law equally, punishing employers who hire undocumented workers below the minimum wage, because exploitation undercuts both foreign and local workers. Fourth, the government should invest in the reforms that create jobs: reducing the regulatory burden on small businesses, expanding property rights so that township entrepreneurs can build equity, and opening the energy and infrastructure sectors to private investment. Free markets do not solve everything, but they are far more likely to create jobs than a mob ever will.

The African Union and SADC have a duty here too. Silence is not diplomacy. Regional leaders should send a clear message to Pretoria that the protection of migrants is a non-negotiable condition of membership in the community of democratic African states. Civil society groups, business associations, and faith communities across South Africa must speak out and stand with migrant neighbours. And every South African citizen should be asking their local councillor and their member of Parliament a simple question: what have you done to stop this?

We refuse to accept that a continent which fought colonialism and apartheid must now watch its people hunt each other for scraps. Mandela did not sacrifice his life so that a century later a mob could decide who may live in Durban. The rule of law is not an abstract luxury. It is the only protection the weak have against the strong and the frightened have against the cruel.

Demand that Pretoria arrest the killers and prosecute the organisers. Demand that Home Affairs fix its backlogs within months, not decades. Demand that the AU and SADC stop issuing statements and start issuing consequences. The next name on the list could belong to someone you know. Act before the next funeral, not after.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24